Delightfully Tacky

On Sunday I was walking home from watching Ten Tiny Dances and ran across this handsome dude and the cutest bebe corg going for a stroll. As I was driving home from Gresham I realized that it was two years ago last Thursday that he proposed to me. I had just finished working as a high school mentor at summer camp, and he came up so we could do a sunrise photoshoot down on the beach. We had very few photos of us together, since I was usually the one behind the camera. I hadn't gotten to hang out with him much all summer, except for a bit on the weekends in between camp sessions. I secretly hoped he would propose. He had asked about what gemstones I liked, and we had talked about marriage, so it certainly wasn't completely out of the blue. I think the proposal was perhaps even more special to me than our wedding. It was just him and I, watching the sun rise, and making a promise to one another to commit our lives to each other. It was intimate in a way our wedding simply couldn't be. It was special to be able to share our wedding with all our friends and family, but that August morning on the beach when we chose one another to go through life with remains one of my most precious moments.

When I met this red headed 18 year old boy back in 2005, something was different. It wasn't like meeting other people. I wouldn't fall in love with him until later in our freshman year, but I still remember meeting him on a meet-new-people binge with a friend. He was sitting on his bed with a bunch of other people in the room, playing his purple acoustic guitar. I finished a diary entry in my Xanga in February of 2006, "We'll just have to see how God plays this all out." If current me traveled back in time to 2006 me and told her how things actually played out, she'd probably kick me in the vagina, claim I was playing a cruel joke on her, and shove me back into 2013, because honestly I couldn't have even wished for anything better than this. I would never have dared to dream that this man could love me as wholly and romantically and hilariously and deeply as he does. It's easy to fall into the doldrums of every day life and forget how incredible it is to be loved so wholly. I'm so grateful for the life we're building together, and to have such a steadfast partner to build beside.